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Tenure Club

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By Jessica Burstein

The first rule of Tenure Club is you do not talk about Tenure Club. The second rule of Tenure Club is you DO NOT talk about tenure club.

It started a ways back, maybe with the GRE's. I failed them, knew it before leaving the room. Beat up the test administrator -- something between impotent rage and tactics, not unlike what had put me in the room to begin with. Anyway, kitten coughed up the answer sheet. Turned in a perfect score, got into grad school. University of Chicago was a breeze; check out its football team sometime.

A few snags with the Critical Inquiry folks -- Critical Injury, more like: Berlant flipped me onto my back and kneed me in the throat, but what you going to do? Like the woman says, it's all about intimacy. But I left my mark. Middleweight, honorable.

Got a job teaching, and was happy for the first few years, showing up for classes sometimes, working the Xerox machine, dating students -- fresh crop every term -- recommending Philip Roth, the usual. Figured that was the way the big boys did it: Start slow, pace yourself, stay strong, see you at the finish line.

Feisty question-and-answer session with Walter Benn Michaels after he gave a guest lecture on campus, had him in tears with my "Whither the New Signifier?" question, the big baby. After he started sobbing, I thought to myself, This is not good. I'm getting soft, talking "whither"; next up is I'm writing memos and hanging out with people from Development. What I need is contact. I want blood. I want, in the words of Mike Tyson, to eat your children. Then I came up for tenure.

The committee was reluctant, and I got a split vote. A lot of flak in the department from Tatiana Vonderloo, a dewy-eyed Belgian scholar who worked on this group of Iowan Amish who started their own language, ended up sounding a lot like late Esperanto -- she explained all this via a logic called The New Parlance. Check out the book, it's called Whither Boise? Duke. Couldn't stand the woman, but as a scholar she kicked a mild, Research Triangle form of ass.

Anyway, the department was split, and that got passed on to the administration, and then the word came down that I was out. Basic "Here's your hat, what's your hurry." I wasn't crazy about the area, but I had found a few good bars and was in no particular hurry to leave, so I decided to explore other options.

A lawyer friend of mine suggested litigation, and money makes the mare go, but I ain't made of horses, so I thought about it a few weeks and then found Tatiana Vonderloo on the lower level of the parking lot, where she parked her Sexus (midlevel Lexus line, Henry Miller series), and told her she had just been awarded honorary membership to Tenure Club, and wiped up that parking lot with her pasty Belgian butt.

Afterward, while she was picking her teeth out of her hair, I said I would be back next week, and she could bring someone else, and I'd clean both of their respective clocks. She brought a modernist, and by the end of the second round we'd established that there really was a distinction between art and politics, because despite all the big talk about a fascist aesthetic, those boys move slow.

Worked my way through the department -- some of them wouldn't show, so I'd follow their husbands or wives or whatevers to the playground with junior and express myself out back of the swing sets, and then suggest a collegial encounter unless they wanted to continue to proxy for their partners.

By mid-November, the committee met again and appealed the administrative decision, and I was back in, with a research budget that would keep me off campus for the next 10 years.

I was elected to the MLA, took down an endowed chair. Beat him over the head with it, if the truth be known. It got fast after that, and by the time I had that Double Trouble thing with Perloff and Coetzee, I was picking my jobs.

I'm back in Manhattan now, the old stomping grounds, if you get me. Started a few Tenure Clubs in Midtown -- put the Hunt back in Hunter. University of New York at Parkside (PUNY) is paying me just to hold "office hours."

Benn Michaels showed up, hungry again for a little abuse, and we had a drink afterward. Gave me a serious right cross to the jaw, and the kid didn't cry when I hit him on the ear. It doesn't feel good, he said. It feels great.